Comic strip

:This article is about the sequential art form. For the British comedy group, see The Comic Strip.

Origins

In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The Little Bears (the first American comic with recurring characters), The Yellow Kid (the first color comic, part of the first Sunday comic section in 1897, and the root of the term "yellow journalism"), and Mutt and Jeff was the first daily comic strip, first appearing in 1907.

Related Topics:
Comics - Joseph Pulitzer - William Randolph Hearst - The Little Bears - American - The Yellow Kid - 1897 - Yellow journalism - Mutt and Jeff - 1907

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The comic strip, in a manner of speaking, began in 1865 in Germany with Max and Moritz, a strip about two trouble-making boys. It was more a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories like "Struwwelpeter" ("Shockheaded Peter"): in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese.

Related Topics:
1865 - Germany - Max and Moritz

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Max and Moritz did provide an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, leading to the debut of The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, probably the first comic strip in the modern sense of the term. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, speech and thought balloons, and sawing logs for snoring originated in Dirks' strip.

Related Topics:
Rudolph Dirks - The Katzenjammer Kids - 1897

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Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids was responsible for one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Pulitzer (unusual, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst) Hearst in a highly unusual court decision retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired a cartoonist named Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and The Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979.

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Hundreds of comic strips followed, with many running for decades.

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